Shooting for sports

I rarely shoot for sports, however I am still going to cover some basic things we should take note if we are going to shoot for one in the future. In general we all know that sports tend to move very fast and very likely we will need to keep to that pace.

1) Shoot manual - Check your lighting situation before the shoot, dial in the shutter speed, aperture and the ISO so that your subject will be properly exposed. Remember to avoid camera shake or motion blur, you need to set your shutter to one second of the focal length you will be using. Work with smaller apertures like f/7.1 or more, this is to create a deeper depth of field to avoid blur images due to focal plane shift.

2) Auto Focus Point - Usually we will focus on our subjects eyes with the center AF point and then compose our shot, but for sports we won't have the time and its tiring to keep doing that. Set your AF point to the ends of your other available points, for example the shot above has its AF point preset to top of the portrait orientation so it will always focus the head area of my subject instead of the body.

3) AF mode and High-speed shooting - When shooting for sports very likely you will be panning and zooming a lot to keep your subject in the frame, which means you cannot be using one shot focus and shutter in this kind of situation. Set your focusing system to focus tracking mode (AI servo for Canon, Continuous focus for Nikon), the camera will automatically keep your focus in check so long as you are holding onto half shutter. Set your shutter mode to High-speed continuous shooting and depending on your camera's ability, by holding down full shutter your camera will continuously shoot for a certain amount of frame per second.

Always remember to check your lighting conditions once in a while, quickly make minor adjustments should it change!